Author: gillie

Oscar Wilde explores society’s idea that beauty, especially as it is understood though Westernized beauty standards makes someone inherently morally good. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) the duality of the beautiful Dorian Gray’s life allows him to explore the moral complexities associated with living a double life. Which eventually alters narratives around the fact that beauty is crucial for a sense of morality. Wilde challenges this narrative, because Dorian Gray is able to separate his actions from his appearance through the guise of a haunted portrait, the intrinsic connection between beauty and morality is upheaved. With each evil Dorian commits, he somehow becomes more beautiful and youthful while his portrait, an actualized picture of his soul, becomes increasingly evil and hideous. 

The novel is riddled with metaphors and allusions to the double-nature of decadence, how beauty and consumption eventually leads to sin, and Dorian Gray becomes a sort of embodiment of this conundrum. Instead of his corruption showing on his own face, his portrait “bears the burden that should have been his own” leading to a “fascination of sin” (Wilde 156). The separation between Gray and his portrait allows him to ignore his own immorality as well as fetishize his “secret pleasure”  which idealizes the impacts of his sin on his conscience (Wilde 156).  The portrait becomes a sick fascination for Dorian where the contrast between the “corruption of his soul” and his beauty “quickens his sense of pleasure” making him in turn “ravenous” for further sin and corruption (Wilde 142). Because the portrait acts as a “presentation of the tragedy of his own soul” he is able to completely separate his terrible actions from his consciousness in the name of upholding his youth and beauty (Wilde 150). This acts as a dissection of the relationship between one’s conscience, one’s soul, and one’s appearance. Because Gray continues his corruption, he boosts his reputation and remains unstained by sin. 

Dorian Gray is able to get away with his acts of folly because of his beauty. People are enamored by his looks, and he understands the power he holds over society. Although he understands the portrait as a “hideous corruption of his soul” and views it as inherently sinful and shameful, he does not view those characteristics as becoming unto himself (Wilde 136). The link between the word “hideous” and “sin” appears consistently throughout the book, therefore further aligning the concept of “beauty” with “goodness.” However this narrative is changed when Dorian Gray rashly lets Basil into his sordid secret. Once he shares his soul with another, he is viewed for the first time as ugly and therefore evil in the eyes of another. This leads him to the ultimate act of corruption “the madness of murder” (Wilde 178). Having exposed his soul to another, he transferred his secret out of the private sphere causing him to break and eventually get his actual hands dirty. Because he was viewed by others as ugly and shameful for the first time, he can no longer hide from the truth of his soul and must take accountability for his actions.

The “New Woman” was a harshly controversial figure throughout the beginning of modern feminism and took many different contending forms. Young, English, author Amy Levy wrote her own way to the New Woman in her 1889 novel The Romance of a Shop. The story explores the relationships between four young sisters as they engage with the world for the first time – each sister takes on a definitive aspect of femininity, and the women are given barely any depth. Through the usage of archetypal understandings of feminism, Amy Levy explores women’s roles in marriage and how it engages with ideas of society and class during the nineteenth century. Because Gertrude Lorimer feels especially trapped by her own propriety and the expectations set for her by herself and society, she is able to grapple with her femininity in a way previously unexplored. 

As the most functional eldest sister Gertrude Lorimer is expected to fix her sister’s mistakes and clean up their messes. She feels the enormous weight of this responsibility and yet is unable to escape it because she feels bound to her duty as the provider. Gertrude must assume “the role of a man” because of the lack of masculinity within the girls’ lives making her a “fountainhead of wisdom” and “a tower of strength” compared to her sisters (Levy 119). Gertrude is constantly being upheld to this standard, and eventually feels trapped by the responsibility she has accumulated. With the end of the novel comes the untimely death of young, beautiful, Phyllis due to an affair, causing her sin to consume her. Out of the tragedy, Gertrude finds herself newly alone and craving external, romantic, love. In a moment of solitude, Gertrude experiences a kind of nervous break, understanding life and love in a new way. The strong, formiddle Gertrude is temporarily disarmed and replaced by the vulnerable young girl she truly is. Dejected by life and consumed by sadness, Gertrude declares that Lord Watergate might have “loved her more if he respected her less” and she begs that he could “understand her, to see how weak she was, for all her struggles to be strong” (Levy 191). Gertrude is desperate for comfort and crumbles within her previously hard shell, no longer able to uphold the expectations of strength, knowledge, and bravery and longs for a man to take those typically masculine responsibilities away from her.

Amy Levy traps Gertrude in a bubble between her understandings of femininity and masculinity which eventually causes Gertrude to break. Throughout the novel Gertrude assumes responsibilities, negotiates and socializes, all new areas for women at the time. Although Gertrude is exposed to the world of new womanhood, she rejects independence and instead chooses to rely on a man to assume her responsibilities. Gertrude Lorimer is a complicated image for the beginning of feminism, because she is a woman who understands what it means to be independent and yet still chooses to find her worth through a man. The breakdown of Gertrude Lorimer is a representational of a woman’s deepest wish, to get married conjoined with the feeling of a lost independence. Gertrude ends the book engaged, fulfilling one wish and ignoring another, which creates the dichotomy of issues the New Woman is made of. 

Themes of Good vs. Evil and Sin vs. Virtue are at the heart of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Immediately there is strong opposition between a fearless band of heroes and the demonic-beast Dracula. Through the binaries these oppositional identities create, Stoker projects ideas of Imperialism and Christian hegemony to create a highly fictionalized tale rooted in the actual world. Carol Senf does not ignore this discourse, and in Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror she dissects the “real” differences between the “heroes’ ‘ and “villains” of the nineteenth century novel. Although the gang of heroes uphold a “moral backbone” to justify their actions, it is evident that the story of Dracula is not as simple as separating Good from Evil. 

Because of the epistolary format of Stoker’s Dracula, the reader is immediately immersed in a set point of view. Proper Englishman, Jonathan Harker is the first of the gang to experience the evil of Dracula, and describes him with “deep burning eyes” reminiscent of the “demons of the pit” and “flames of hell” (Stoker 44/55). The Count is akinned to images of Hell and Satan, and his home, Transylvania, is more broadly depicted as a “cursed land, where the devil and his children” are “fearless without religion” (Stoker 57). Dracula and the “way of life which he represents” is composed of everything “other” and therefore explicitly evil (Senf 425). Therefore, Dracula must be the incarnation of everything Empirical English society fears – making him into an antichrist, and everyone else as a necessary savior. 

Polar imagery and societal ideas influence this reading of Dracula as completely oppositional to the English world the gang inhabits. Our band of heroes takes on a collective voice, even though they are each representative of different classic literary archetypes. Just as Dracula is meant to represent all evil, they collectively represent all good as it is defined by English morality. Through this, the gang of heroes is able to wield their perceived morality and justness against Dracula to justify their gory acts of violence. Because these characters use their “rigorous moral arguments” to justify their wrongdoings, the reader’s perception of their evils are never equated to that of Dracula’s. Regardless of the similarities between the actions (Senf 425). This “moral blindness” is indicative of the narrator’s inability to objectively see their own actions, and the reader’s perception of the story through the “heroes” eyes (Senf 425). 

The lens of morality as it is understood by Christian society ignores the gang’s inherent wrong doings. This is especially present at the grave of Lucy Westerna, who, subjected to the evil of Dracula, has become completely unrecognizable. The once virginal image of Lucy is now overtaken by demonic powers of evil; her “sweetness turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty” and her “purity to voluptuous wantonness” (Stoker 199). Lucy must undergo this complete formal shift for the men’s violent murder of her to be justified. If her purity was not “stained” then her murder would be an unjust one, but because she has been overtaken by the powers of evil and sin as they are represented in Dracula, she is deserving of death (Stoker 200). Through this lens, the murder of Lucy Westerna is deemed a necessary saving instead of a merciless homicide. 

Because of the subjectivity of the journal entries and letters the story is composed of, the average reader of Dracula is going to align with the gang’s own justification of the violence they commit. Neither their morality or actions are ever called into question on the basis that religious individuals can never commit sin or sinful acts. It is this perceived “duty to defend innocents” that grants the heroes their titles, regardless of the similarities between their actions and The Counts’. The concealment of objectivity through the epistolary narrative therefore protects the gang under England’s guiding “rubric of religion” (Senf 428). Moral duty is the sole justification the band has against their actions, and without the influence of Christian, English society the lines between good and evil become blurred.  Therefore, Dracula must draw on cultural representations of fear for the book to be read in such a subjective manner.

The Fin de Siècle was an era filled with revolutionary change. At the heart of changing perspectives, was a shifting discourse surrounding the definition of femininity. The exploration into gender questioned ideas of good and bad, modesty and sin, the devil and God, and how all these comprised a woman’s role in society. This exploratory discourse is represented in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through the evolutionary shift of damsel, Lucy Westenra. In a concluding passage on her vampirism, the language used to describe Lucy’s metamorphosis shows the polar perspectives of female purity during the end of the Nineteenth century. 

Lucy Westenra is first introduced to the novel as the embodiment of an angel. She is beautiful, pure, and absolutely captures the attention of all men who cross her path. Lucy is always categorized by the “angelic beauty” of her eyes, and on her deathbed this pure form of beauty is especially present (154). As Lucy succumbs to death her beauty grows, “restoring the beauty of life” back into her corpse (158). Her likeness to “light” and “loveliness” marks a sort of dedication to her purity. While Lucy is a human on earth, she is akin to such adjectives to mark her as a proper, pure woman – the ultimate form anyone could hope for. It is in the peace and serenity of death that she truly shines “every hour seemed to be enhancing her loveliness” and Lucy continues to allure all her male solicitors (162). Stuck between her two forms, and the two worlds of life and death, Lucy is still viewed as pure and lovely. In the liminal space Lucy occupies before her soul is completely overtaken by the “devil” she is able to shift into a transcendent pure beauty. In death, she is akin to an angel more than ever, and the men, specifically her husband Arthur, have trouble resisting her dazzling beauty (155). In life Lucy is just irresistibly beautiful and filled with natural “light and loveliness” (155). Because of her perceived purity, she is given grace even as sin slowly overtakes her fleeting soul. 

Once Lucy is fully transformed into a vampire, her beauty does not leave her but the discourse surrounding her shifts. Where she once embodied purity through her beauty, in her new form her apperance is sinful, transforming her into a sort of seductress. Lucy the vampire’s sweetness has turned to “adamantine heartless cruelty” and her purity to “voluptuous wantonness” (199). Later, the blood stains her, in turn staining her reputation and forever “stain[ing] the purity of her lawn death robe” (200). The  sin has transformed her, and therefore transformed the innocence of her beauty. Lucy is no less beautiful, however the interpretation of her beauty has shifted and turned her into a ravaging seductress. Even her characteristic eyes have changed, they are now “unclean and full of hell fire” no longer the “gentle orbs” they once were (200). Although her appearance has shifted, Lucy’s grip on the men in the story has not, and they are still wildly (just now sinfully) attracted to her. In a climatic moment, Lucy beckons to Arthur, drawing him into her: “leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together” (200). Lucy is more direct than ever, and her call is irresistible – Arthur has to be physically restrained from her as if he is resisting a siren. As Lucy has been overcome by the devil, her beauty has turned to sin. Like the blood that stains her robes, her sexuality has now been asserted – forever staining her reputation. 

Over the course of Dracula, the dialogic shift in the description of Lucy’s beauty tracks the expression of feminine sexuality, and the perception of it during the Fin de Siècle. In life, Lucy’s beauty is representative of an inherent purity marking her as angelic. However, when she overcomes a formal shift, her beauty transforms with her. Lucy the vampire is now seen as dirtied by the blood she craves, newly aligning her to the devil and sin. This classifies beauty as something inherent and uncontrollable, and when a woman becomes in control of it she somehow becomes dangerous – as if she was bloodthirsty. The expression of Lucy’s beauty throughout Dracula tracks the end of the 19th century’s understanding of a woman’s sexuality and, in turn, power.